Note: A recent article in “National Geographic” made me realize the Egyptian mummy displayed at the Museum in Racibórz, the town where my father was born in 1907, dates not from the 12th dynasty (1985-1773 BC), as I previously understood, but rather from the 22nd dynasty (943-716 BC). As a retired archaeologist, and in anticipation of an upcoming trip my wife and I have planned to Egypt, this inadvertent discovery allows me to correct the record and provide brief details on the evolution of Egyptian mummification.
The August 2023 issue of National Geographic includes a short article by Jason Treat entitled “The Golden Age of Mummification,” describing how archaeological excavations at an ancient mortuary complex is shedding light on how this craft was once a booming business including for more than just pharaohs. The workshop associated with the necropolis, or cemetery, of the ancient capital of Memphis, Saqqara, was discovered in 2016; this site is situated along the west bank of the Nile River not far from Cairo. Excavations in a burial shaft there referred to as “K24,” dating to the 26th dynasty (664 B.C.-c. 525 B.C.), provide evidence that embalming took place underground, in this instance at a depth of 40 feet. Astonishingly, the shaft at K24 extends to a depth of 98 feet. It is believed that the deeper a body was buried, the more wealthy or important the individual was likely to have been in life.
By the 26th dynasty, the rituals and processes of mummification had been around for more than 2,000 years. During the Early Dynastic Period associated with the 1st through 3rd dynasties (3150 B.C.- 2613 B.C.), the mummies found in Saqqara were believed to be royal, though as early as the Old Kingdom, beginning with the 4th dynasty (c. 2613 to 2494 B.C.), elite nonroyals were also being mummified.
A figure included in Jason Treat’s article, labeled “The Evolution of Mummification in Ancient Egypt,” alerted me to the fact that the mummy displayed at the Museum in Racibórz was incorrectly attributed to the 12th dynasty. The dates I initially provided, 946-722 B.C., I quickly realized correspond to the 22nd dynasty. I confirmed with Magda Wawoczny, my acquaintance from Racibórz, that my earlier understanding as to the age of the mummified Egyptian lady, Dzed-Amonet-ius-anch, was in error; Magda explained the mummy and sarcophagus were dated at between 800 and 750 B.C. using C-14 dating.
I expect that for most readers, the significance of the mummy in Racibórz is how the remains wound up there rather than its age, yet in the interest of accuracy I feel a need to correct the previously provided information.
Below, I’ll point out a few differences in how the Egyptian lady may have been mummified.
As mentioned, during the Early Dynastic Period associated with the mummification exclusively of royals, bodies were wrapped in linen bandages treated with resin and mineral salts, with the entrails left in the body. By the Middle Kingdom, including the 12th dynasty, techniques occasionally involved removal of the brain via the nostrils and the injection of resins to dissolve entrails, which were subsequently removed through body orifices. By the 22nd dynasty, part of the Third Intermediate Period, mummification had reached its apex. By this time, efforts were undertaken to make the body look as lifelike as possible and included stuffing the cavity to preserve its shape.
As mentioned in Post 140, the Egyptian mummy displayed in Racibórz supposedly originates from a necropolis in Thebes, near present-day Luxor. Baron Rothschild purchased it along with three canopic jars presumably containing the viscera in 1860 while on a trip to Egypt. Stripped of its provenience and absent any recorded information as to its origin, the hieroglyphics on the sarcophagus provide the most useful clues about the mummy. Supposedly, Baron Rothschild purchased it as a gift for his fiancé who was apparently not amused. I can find no indication a marriage to a second wife ever took place.
In any case, shortly after his return from Egypt, at his palace in Šilheřovice, in current-day Czech Republic, Rothschild in the presence of guests invited to a social gathering had two sarcophagi opened, the cartonnage cut, and the embalmed linen-covered corpse unwrapped. In 1864, the baron decided to donate the souvenirs from his Egyptian journey to the Antiquity Department of the Royal Evangelical Gymnasium in Racibórz. When the museum in Racibórz opened in 1927, they formally took possession of the mummy.
While the Egyptian mummy ultimately wound up in a museum, where it rightfully always should have been, this incident reminded me of an account by the world-famous Egyptian archaeologist, Dr. Zahi Hawass in connection with the 2006 Tutankhamun exhibit at the Field Museum in Chicago. The incident in question speaks to the fact that antiquities belong in museums not in private collections. In Dr. Hawass’ own words:
“. . .my experiences have provided me with many interesting stories. Let me tell you one of my favorites here: In 2006, the Tutankhamun was going to open in the Field Museum in Chicago under the sponsorship of Exelon, an American energy company. At the press conference, where we were to announce the opening, the executive vice-president of Exelon apologized that the company president, John Rowe, could not attend the conference because he had a meeting with President George W. Bush. The vice-president mentioned that Mr. Rowe loved ancient Egypt and even had an Egyptian coffin in his office.
I stood up and said that King Tutankhamun would not have been pleased to see an ancient coffin in a private office. Antiquities, I announced, must be either left at their original sites or kept in museums where everyone could see and enjoy them. I said that this coffin had to be given to the Field Museum or I would remove Exelon’s name from sponsorship of the Tutankhamun exhibition. Rowe refused, and the story made the first page of the ‘Chicago Tribune.’ I wrote an official letter to delete Exelon from all the written documents associated with the exhibition—and Rowe finally agreed to give the coffin as a gift to the Field Museum. On its front page the ‘Chicago Tribune’ declared that two pharaohs were fighting and the real one won.” (Hawass 2019:14-15)
Note: This post features a discussion about how an Egyptian mummy landed at the Museum in Racibórz during the European period of “Egyptomania.” This installment allows me to make some intriguing connections to people and places I’ve discussed in earlier posts, while briefly telling readers about scholars who were involved in the decipherment of the Egyptian hieroglyphics following the discovery of the Rosetta Stone during Napoleon’s expedition to Egypt and Syria between 1798 and 1801.
One of the featured attractions at the Museum in Racibórz, the town where my father Dr. Otto Bruck was born in 1907 when Ratibor was still part of Germany, is an Egyptian mummy. (Figure 1) While I like to imagine my father wandering through the cavernous spaces of the museum as a child gaping in awe at this ancient object, the fact is the official opening of the museum did not take place until the 4th of December 1927, several years after my father had left for Berlin to attend university. Still, it’s possible my father contemplated this unusual artifact when he was a high school student at the Royal Evangelical Gymnasium in Ratibor (Figure 2) where the mummy then resided.
According to the museum’s website, the idea of establishing the Museum in Racibórz arose at the beginning of the twentieth century and was instigated by lecturers from the Royal Evangelical Gymnasium. The Gymnasium was the subject of Post 60. The site of the present-day museum is a 14th century deconsecrated building that once belonged to the congregation of the Dominican Order that had been abandoned and in ruins since 1911. Following its restoration and official opening in 1927, the first exhibitions included presentations of tin, glass, and porcelain, militaria, sculptures and sacred paintings, liturgical books, and objects, and ethnographic articles. Amidst the exhibits of mostly regional artifacts, what eventually stood out was an Egyptian mummy, along with cartonnage and sarcophagi, that was displayed after 1934. How these materials came to be housed at the Museum in Racibórz is the focus of this blog post.
Anselm Salomon von Schwartz Rothschild, Baron Rothschild (1803-1874) (Figure 3), was an Austrian banker and a member of the Vienna branch of the Jewish Rothschild family. He was lord of nearby Chałupki (German: Annaberg) and Šilheřovice (German: Schillersdorf, Polish: Szylerzowice), located slightly less than 16 miles south of Racibórz along the current Poland-Czech Republic border. (Figures 4-5) In about 1860, following the death of his wife in 1859, Baron Rothschild went on a journey to Egypt and brought back numerous souvenirs, including a complete burial of an Egyptian woman. This was intended as a present for his fiancée, who rejected his overture. As a related aside, I can find no evidence that Baron Rothschild ever remarried, so perhaps this peculiar gift convinced his unnamed fiancée she was no longer interested. In any case, shortly after his return from Egypt, at his palace in Šilheřovice, Rothschild in the presence of guests invited to a social gathering had two sarcophagi opened, the cartonnage cut, and the embalmed linen-covered corpse unwrapped.
In 1864, the baron decided to donate the souvenirs from his Egyptian journey to the Antiquity Department of the Royal Evangelical Gymnasium in Racibórz. When the museum in Racibórz opened in 1927, they formally took possession of the mummy though at the time it was on loan to a museum in Gliwice (German: Gleiwitz) that refused to return it until 1934, keeping it for a dozen years.
According to a tourist brochure developed for Racibórz’s Information Center by Grzegorz Wawoczny, coincidentally the father of Magda Wawoczny who authored Post 139, the following is written: “Scientific research on the mummy done by the famous German Egyptologist Charles Richard Lepsius revealed that the Egyptian woman lived during the 12th dynasty (946-722 B.C.). Her name was Dzed-Amonet-ius-anch, which means ‘goddess Amonet said she would live.’ She was a rich married woman, probably daughter of a priest and barber from Thebes. She died young at the age of about 20. The reason for her death, according to radiological research, was most probably pregnancy complications.”
Regular readers may recall from Post 136 my discussion on Napoleon’s expedition to Egypt and Syria between 1798 and 1801. As I previously wrote, this campaign was initiated to defend French trade interests and to establish scientific enterprise in the region. This is also the expedition that led to the discovery of the renowned trilingual Rosetta Stone, which we all learned about in grade school was the key to deciphering Egyptian hieroglyphics.
The Rosetta Stone is a stele composed of granodiorite inscribed with three versions of a decree issued in Memphis, Egypt, in 196 B.C. during the Ptolemaic dynasty on behalf of King Ptolemy V Epiphanes. The top and middle texts are in Ancient Egyptian using hieroglyphic and Demotic scripts, respectively, while the bottom is in Ancient Greek. Because the decree has only minor differences between the three versions, it was key to deciphering the Egyptian scripts.
The writing systems used in ancient Egypt were deciphered in the early nineteenth century, largely through the work of Jean-François Champollion (1790-1832) and Thomas Young (1773-1829). The decipherment of the ancient hieroglyphics using the Rosetta Stone marked the beginning of the scientific study of Egyptology.
Scientists had long wondered about the function and nature of hieroglyphic script, whether the scripts recorded a language and the degree to which the signs were phonetic (representing speech sounds) or ideographic (another term for ideogram which is a written character symbolizing the idea of a thing without indicating the sounds used to say it). Prior to Champollion and Young’s work, many thought hieroglyphic script was only used for sacred and ritual functions, and that as such it was unlikely to be decipherable since it was tied to esoteric and philosophical concepts and did not record historical information. Young built on the work of earlier scholars and identified the meaning of many hieroglyphs, including phonetic glyphs in a cartouche containing the name of an Egyptian king of foreign origin, Ptolemy V. Comparing Ptolemy’s cartouche with others, by the early 1820s Champollion realized that hieroglyphic script was a mixture of phonetic and ideographic elements. This upended earlier assumptions and made it possible to begin to uncover many kinds of information recorded by the Egyptians.
After Young’s death in 1829 and Champollion’s in 1832, decipherment efforts languished. Then, in 1837 the aforementioned German Egyptologist Charles Richard Lepsius, who identified the Egyptian mummy at the Museum of Racibórz, pointed out that many hieroglyphs represented combinations of two or three sounds rather than one, thus correcting one of the most fundamental faults in Champollion’s work. Further refinements by later scholars meant that by 1850 it was possible to fully translate ancient Egyptian texts.
In France, Napoleon’s discoveries precipitated a period of “Egyptomania,” which refers to a period of renewed interest in the culture of ancient Egypt sparked by Napoleon’s Egyptian Campaign in the 19th century. Napoleon was accompanied by many scientists and scholars during this campaign, which led to a large interest in the documentation of ancient monuments in Egypt. Thorough documentation of ancient ruins led to an increase in the interest about ancient Egypt.
Egyptomania was not confined to French culture. My earlier Post 136 was specifically focused on a Nubian boy, Sabac el Cher, who was “gifted” to Prince Friedrich Heinrich Albrecht of Prussia (1809-1872) in February 1843 while the prince was on his “Oriental Journey,” seemingly a compulsory destination among the upper classes. In that post I cited a diary written by Georg Erbkam, entitled “Diary of my Egyptian Journey, 1842-1843.” Erbkam was an architect and part of a research expedition commissioned by the Prussian King Friedrich Wilhelm IV, who happens to have been Friedrich Heinrich Albrecht’s older brother. On the 7th of April 1843 the two groups met up while traveling in Egypt.
Among the scientists who was involved in the research expedition commissioned by the Prussian King was none other than Charles Richard Lepsius. He was recruited by the Prussian King at the recommendation of other scientists to lead an expedition to Egypt and the Sudan to explore and record the remains of the ancient Egyptian civilization. According to his Wikipedia entry, “The Prussian expedition was modelled after the earlier Napoleonic mission, with surveyors, draftsmen, and other specialists. The mission reached Giza in November 1842 and spent six months making some of the first scientific studies of the pyramids of Giza, Abusir, Saqqara, and Dahshur. They discovered 67 pyramids recorded in the pioneering Lepsius list of pyramids and more than 130 tombs of noblemen in the area. While at the Great Pyramid of Giza, Lepsius inscribed a graffito written in Egyptian hieroglyphs that honours Friedrich Wilhelm IV above the pyramid’s original entrance; it is still visible.”
I would conclude by saying that the involvement of the German Egyptologist Charles Richard Lepsius in the identification of an Egyptian mummy that curiously resides at the Museum of Racibórz who was also involved in the decipherment of the hieroglyphs resonates with me as a retired archaeologist in a way it may not with readers. If so, I apologize to readers for wasting your valuable time.
REFERENCES
“Decipherment of ancient Egyptian scripts.” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decipherment_of_ancient_Egyptian_scripts
Erbkam, Georg Gustav: Tagebuch meiner egyptischen Reise. Teil 3. Ägypten, 1844-1845.
The following is a guest post written by Ms. Magda Wawoczny, a student in Jewish studies at Jagiellonian University in Krakow, Poland, who hails from Racibórz, Poland. Magda first contacted me in 2021 when she was working on her bachelor’s degree and interviewed me about my family’s connection to Ratibor (today: Racibórz, Poland), when the city was part of Germany. Regular readers know that my family owned the Bruck’s “Prinz von Preußen” Hotel in Ratibor from around 1850 through the mid-1920s. Knowing I had visited Racibórz on a few occasions, Magda was also interested in my impressions of the city.
In May 2023, Magda reached out to me again in connection with her ongoing master’s degree work in Jewish studies, still centered around her hometown. Surprisingly, she asked if I could help her get in touch with Monica Lewinsky’s father, Dr. Bernard Lewinsky, who is a Radiation Oncologist in Los Angeles. Unbeknownst to me, Monica’s immediate ancestors come from Ratibor and her great-grandfather, Salo Lewinsky, was once buried in the former Jewish cemetery in Ratibor.
More recently Magda has been researching a Jewish woman by the name of Minna Linzer, née Guttmann (1873-1928) whose body had been exhumed in 1972 from the former Jewish cemetery in Ratibor prior to its destruction in 1973 and reburied in the town’s Catholic cemetery. The reason for this is explained in the current post. Magda’s interest in contacting Dr. Lewinsky stems from the fact that the Lewinsky and Linzer families were friends. Whereas the Lewinsky family emigrated to El Salvador during the 1920s and thereby survived the Holocaust, most of Minna Linzer’s family stayed in Ratibor and therefore perished.
Separately, but at around the same time as I was trying to reach Dr. Bernard Lewinsky, a German lady by the name of Ms. Jessica Nastos contacted me through my blog’s webmail. Jessica had stumbled upon Post 72 where I discussed so-called cabinet cards. One studio I’d specifically mentioned that produced these cards in Ratibor was the Helios Photo Studio, which was the subject of my previous post. Jessica told me her mother had once worked in the studio and offered to send me contemporary photos of the studio including a picture of an old envelope with the studio’s name and logo. Upon receiving the pictures, I realized they included images of the Linzer’s that Magda has been researching, including most family members from Ratibor who died in the Holocaust; astonishingly, there was even a picture of Minna Linzer, née Guttmann with her oldest son Jan (Germans: Hans). Minna’s husband, Hermann Linzer (1874-1944), carried this photo with him throughout World War I, and a bullet hole through the photo attests to a wound he suffered during the war. (Figure A)
When so many Jews were murdered by the Nazis in their effort to obliterate proof of their existence, it is bitter satisfaction to uncover photos of some of these people to emphasize the fact that the Nazis ultimately failed.
With the above as backdrop, I now turn the lectern over to Magda.
POST 139: THE STORY OF A JEWISH WOMAN BURIED IN RACIBÓRZ’S CATHOLIC CEMETERY
BY
MAGDA WAWOCZNY
JAGIELLONIAN UNIVERSITY
The most important places related to the Jewish heritage of Racibórz that survived the end of World War II were the synagogue and the cemetery. While the synagogue was destroyed by a fire on the 9th of November 1938 on Kristallnacht (Figure 1), it endured as a ruin until it was demolished, the exact date of which is still being investigated. By contrast, the cemetery survived basically intact. Unfortunately, the Jewish inhabitants of Racibórz disappeared from the city’s landscape during the war—those who managed to escape after Kristallnacht survived outside Germany, those who remained died in concentration camps. As a result, the Jewish cemetery in Racibórz was eventually razed since the community which it had served no longer existed to take care of it. Or so it seemed until now. . .
Currently, for the purposes of my master’s thesis, I am researching the Jewish cemetery which was ultimately demolished in 1973. Based on the available sources, it is known that before the liquidation, photo documentation of all the burials and headstones was made by Mr. Kazimierz Świtliński (Figure 2) at the request of the city authorities. The documentation is on file at the Museum of Racibórz, and illustrates impressive tombstones made of marble, granite, and sandstone. In this post I will focus on one belonging to Minna Linzer, née Guttmann. (Figure 3)
During my archival investigations, my attention was drawn to an application by a woman from Racibórz who requested permission from the city authorities to exhume the body of her grandmother Minna Linzer from Ratibor’s former Jewish cemetery and transfer it together with the tombstone to the Catholic cemetery in the Ostróg district on Rudzka street. The woman emphasized that in the face of the anticipated liquidation of the cemetery, she felt an obligation to save the grave of her grandmother that she had taken care of and maintained for many years. The granddaughter was Elizabeth (Elzbieta) “Lilly” Slawik, née Grzonka. Her application to the city authorities was accompanied by a card with the inscription “eternal memory of those lost in the Auschwitz camp: Hermann Linzer, Jan Linzer, Małgorzata and Henryk Schiftan, Lota and Maks Tichauer.” (Figure 4)
Knowing only Elizabeth’s name and address, I started searching for her relatives. Fortunately, I managed to reach Elizabeth’s son, Minna’s great-grandson currently living in Germany. He explained that Elizabeth was the daughter of a Jewish man and a Catholic woman, and that the above-mentioned names are inscribed on the relocated grave in the Catholic cemetery. Elizabeth’s son mentioned that his mother took care of his great-grandmother’s tomb, and when she learned it was about to be destroyed, asked permission for the grave to be exhumed. Fascinatingly, he also mentioned that his mother had looked after the grave of Monica Lewinsky’s great-grandfather, Salo Lewinsky. (Figure 5) Despite directions from Elisabeth’s son to Minna’s grave in the Catholic cemetery, it was not easy to find.
Having been given the name of Salo Lewinsky’s still living grandson, Bernard Lewinsky, by Lilly’s son, I decided to try and contact him. For this purpose, I asked Richard Brook, author of this blog, for help. Dr. Lewinsky is an oncologist in Los Angeles, so he was quickly able to get in touch with him. Upon establishing contact, Dr. Lewinsky confirmed that his father George Lewinsky (1903-1989) had remained in contact with Elisabeth who took care of his father’s grave. Until the death of Bernard’s father, the families remained in contact. Unfortunately, the grave of Bernard’s grandfather, Salo, could not be saved when the Jewish cemetery was dismantled.
Thanks also to Richard’s help, I was able to obtain some information on the names inscribed on Minna Guttmann’s headstone and found on the card accompanying Elizabeth’s request to exhume her grave, such as their former place of residence, their occupations, and the date of the deportations to the Theresienstadt concentration camp.
A breakthrough in my research came when Richard coincidentally received an email from Elizabeth’s great-granddaughter, Jessica Nastos, about the Helios Photo Studio which was the subject of Richard’s blog Post 138; it turns out “Lilly” had worked there. Thanks to Jessica, I learned that Elizabeth was the child of a Jew, Jan Linzer (mentioned on the card accompanying Elizabeth’s application to the city authorities), and a Catholic, Paulina Grzonka, who could not be together due to the Nazi rule and the specter of war. (Figure 6) To protect themselves and Elizabeth, Paulina and Jan decided not to get married, although they symbolically exchanged rings as keepsakes, with each other’s initials engraved on them. Paulina (1895-1971) and Elizabeth (1926-2016) survived, while Jan (1901-1945) died in the Auschwitz concentration camp.
Thanks to Jessica’s information, it was possible to establish the identities of the people on the card. Minna Linzer (1873-1928) was the first wife of Hermann Linzer (1874-1944). She died in 1928, and after her death Hermann got remarried to a woman named Amalie Nebenzahl (1884-1944). Both died in 1944 in Theresienstadt. Hermann and Minna had four children: Jan (German: Hans), Małgorzata (German: Margaret), Lota, and Leo. Leo, the youngest son, was the only one who survived the war. (Figure 7) Małgorzata and Lota together with their husbands also died in Theresienstadt.
Thanks to Jessica, based on photos from the 1990s, which show a relocated grave in the Catholic cemetery, I was able to find it. It is still there and in very good condition. (Figure 8) When it seemed that only archival documents and stories remained of the city’s Jewish heritage, it turns out that there is a preserved remnant of Jews in Racibórz, and Minna’s grave is proof of that.
Note: In this post, I discuss the fate of the hotel my family owned for three generations in Ratibor [today: Racibórz, Poland]. Largely intact following the cessation of hostilities after WWII, it appears to have been demolished for a combination of reasons, including geopolitical ones and the Soviet Union’s desire to remove historical traces of German connections to Silesia.
Regular readers know I periodically revisit topics or people I’ve talked about to amplify new findings. Since the process of learning rarely follows a linear path, one is often left to reevaluate previous findings or conclusions considering more recently uncovered evidence.
The family establishment in Ratibor [today: Racibórz, Poland], the Bruck’s “Prinz Von Preußen” Hotel, was owned for what I estimate are roughly three generations, from the early 1850s to around the mid-1920s. (Figures 1-2) A historic police file found at the “State Archives in Katowice Branch in Racibórz” indicates the business was sold in around 1926, and subsequently went through a series of owners. (Figure 3)
I thought I had previously laid to rest the issue of why the building does not stand today. It would be reasonable to assume the structure was destroyed during World War II, by Allied bombing of the city prior to its capture or in the waning days of the war when the Soviets encircled and seized the city. However, a post-WWII photo given to me by a curator at the Muzeum w Raciborzu proves the structure was largely intact possibly apart from the roof; the photo, while of high resolution, is taken at too great a distance to ascertain how badly the roof was damaged. (Figure 4)
Realizing the Bruck’s “Prinz Von Preußen” Hotel, which oddly retained its name throughout its existence despite its Jewish origins, outlasted the cataclysmic events of WWII, I sought another explanation for why it might not have survived. This was provided, so I thought, by Mr. Paul Newerla (Figure 5), my friend from Racibórz, a retired lawyer who now researches and writes extensively about the history of Silesia and Ratibor. Paul sent me a copy of a letter he found in the Racibórz Archives dated the 27th of March 1950 from the so-called Racibórz Municipal Board to the Municipal National Council in Racibórz (Figure 6); in essence, the letter states that damaged buildings in the town had been evaluated for their “historic character” and found lacking, so that parts of or all a structure could be dismantled to provide 5,000,000 bricks needed for the reconstruction of Warsaw.
Indicative of the method used to clear burned and destroyed houses and buildings in Racibórz, Paul found another letter dated the 12th of January 1948 sent from the Konservator of the Voivodeship, essentially the province, to the Technical Department of Racibórz’s Municipal Department. (Figure 7) The province was reminding the Municipal Board that the use of explosives to clear these damaged structures in the vicinity of historic edifices such as the Church of the Blessed Virgin Mary in Racibórz was prohibited. It is safe to assume that explosives were similarly used to take down the Bruck’s Hotel.
Why the city of Racibórz would have agreed to or recommended the dismantling of perfectly functional structures like the former family hotel probably requiring only minor reconstruction at a time when housing was likely in short supply seems to defy logic. Paul jumped to my assistance to explain broader geopolitical factors that apparently dictated why the former family establishment was torn down. I will attempt to explain this to readers.
The address for the Bruck’s “Prinz Von Preußen” Hotel was Oderstraße 16 (Figure 8); the hotel was located on an east-west street that terminated along the west bank of the Oder River [Polish: Odra]. (Figure 9) The historic walled city of Ratibor lay along the west side of the Oder River, as does much of the current central part of Racibórz. The location of the hotel along the west side of the Oder River is significant, as I will demonstrate. Spoiler alert. The destruction of the Bruck’s Hotel may be partially related to the anticipated location of the German-Polish frontier following the end of WWII.
The subject of Poland’s western frontier was brought up by the Soviet leader Joseph Stalin as early as late 1943 at the Tehrān Conference; this was a meeting between U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin held in Tehrān between November 28–December 1, 1943. The chief discussion centered on the opening of a “second front” in western Europe. Stalin agreed to an eastern offensive to coincide with the forthcoming Western Front. On the Polish question, the western Allies and the Soviet Union were at sharp odds. While the Americans were not interested in discussing any border changes during the Tehrān Conference, Roosevelt agreed in principle that Poland’s western border should be extended west to the Oder River.
At the Yalta Conference, during the second of the Big Three conferences between Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin held in February 1945, American and British officials agreed on the basics of Poland’s future borders. In the east, the British agreed to the Curzon line, the proposed demarcation line between the Second Polish Republic and the Soviet Union, two new states emerging after World War I; this line was first proposed in 1919. The British acknowledged that the Americans might push for Lwów, current-day Lviv in western Ukraine, to be included in post-war Poland. It was generally agreed that Poland should receive part of East Prussia, Danzig, the eastern part of Pomerania, and Upper Silesia; for reference Ratibor, present-day Racibórz, was in Upper Silesia.
In terms of this blog post, the following observation in Wikipedia is relevant: “With respect to Poland’s western frontiers, Stalin noted that the Polish Prime Minister in exile, Stanisław Mikołajczyk, had been pleased when Stalin had told him Poland would be granted Stettin/Szczecin and the German territories east of the Western Neisse [River]. Yalta was the first time the Soviets openly declared support for a German-Polish frontier on the Western as opposed to the Eastern Neisse. Churchill objected to the Western Neisse frontier, saying ‘it would be a pity to stuff the Polish goose so full of German food that it got indigestion.’ He added that many Germans would be shocked if such large numbers of Germans were driven out of these areas, to which Stalin responded that ‘many Germans’ had ‘already fled before the Red Army.’” The question of Poland’s western border was ultimately left to be decided at the Potsdam Conference.
Let me digress briefly to give readers a sense of geography regarding the whereabouts of the Western and Eastern Neisse Rivers in relationship to the location of Racibórz. The Neisse River, in Polish Nysa, is two rivers in present-day southwestern Poland. The better-known Nysa Łużycka, or Lusatian Neisse, is the more westerly and longer of the two rivers running 157 miles or 252 km; the Nysa Kłodzka, or Glatzer Leisse or Neisse of the city of Kłodzko (Glatz), is the shorter is 113 miles or 182 km and lies entirely within Poland. Both rivers rise in the Sudeten Mountains, flow northward, and empty into the Oder River. (Figure 10) Near the village of Ratzdorf, the Lusatian Neisse discharges into the Oder River.
Görlitz, located on the more westerly Lusatian Neisse River, is the easternmost town in Germany (easternmost village is Zentendorf), and lies opposite the Polish town of Zgorzelec. Görlitz is slightly less than 200 miles west-northwest of Racibórz (Figure 11), while Kłodzko along the Eastern Neisse is only about 90 miles to the west-northwest of Racibórz. (Figure 12)
As readers can easily discern for themselves, the Soviet proposal to establish Poland’s western frontier along either the Western Neisse or Eastern Neisse would have resulted and did ultimately result in considerably more land being included within Poland. However, at the time of the Yalta Conference, the precise location of Poland’s western border was still an open question. The western Allies accepted in general that the Oder River into which both the eastern and western Neisse rivers emptied would be the western border of Poland in that area. Still in doubt at the time was whether the border would follow the eastern or western Neisse. The western Allies sought to place the border on the eastern Neisse closer to Breslau [today: Wrocław, Poland]. Suggestions of a border on the Bóbr River (Bober) were also supposedly rejected by the Soviets.
At the latitude at which Racibórz is located, the eastern and western Neisse are situated much further to the west of the Oder River. In none of the materials I’ve read have I seen any mention that the Allies were seriously considering establishing the border between Germany and Poland along the Oder at this latitude; as mentioned above, the discussion always revolved around establishing the western frontier along the Neisse rivers or conceivably along the Bober River. (see Figure 10) While this may be true, as far as the local authorities in Racibórz may have been concerned, there may have been sufficient uncertainty as to where the final frontier would be established. Thus, to hedge their bets, the Communist authorities may have decided to dismantle the Bruck’s Hotel and salvage the bricks fearing it would remain on the German side of the border.
A recent citation sent to me by Paul Newerla sheds additional light on how the Bruck’s Hotel was destroyed. On page 69 of a book entitled in Polish “Od Joannitow Do Ratownikow–Czyli Dzieje Strazakow Ziemi Raciborskiej,” translated roughly as “From the Joanites to the rescuers or the history of firefighters of the Racibórz Land,” there is an eyewitness account by a former firefighter who worked for the fire brigade in Racibórz. (Figures 13a-c)
“One day (it was 1945, without further date) the fire brigade was alerted and ordered to the fire of the Hotel Bruck on the corner of Oderstraße and Bollwerkstraße (now Reymonta-Straße). The hotel was in unusually good condition after the war. When the firefighters appeared with their firefighting trailer in front of the burning hotel, they met Russian soldiers equipped with weapons. They refused to have the hotel deleted [sic]. The Polish administration was also powerless. So the beautiful hotel burned.”
It would appear, based on this account, that perhaps an evening of drunken debauchery by occupying Russian soldiers “accidentally” led to the Bruck’s Hotel being set on fire and to the establishment’s ultimate destruction; clearly, the soldiers had no interest in seeing the fire extinguished when the firefighters showed up. Depending on the intensity of the fire, it’s likely the bricks would still have been usable and likely salvaged.
Time and again through history, we have seen foreign invaders attempting to destroy traces of earlier history and culture in places they occupy, to rewrite the past, so to speak. The Nazis sought to eradicate Jewish culture. Currently, we are witnessing in the Ukraine Russians plundering museums in places like Kherson and Mariupol, because, above all, according to Putin’s propaganda, “Ukraine as a country doesn’t exist, it’s part of Russia—so they can grab anything they want.” Thus, like today, it’s probable the orders to wipe out evidence of earlier cultures in Racibórz following WWII were coming from someone high in the Kremlin, likely Stalin himself. Later, during the Communist Era, the headstones in the former Jewish Cemetery in Ratibor were removed and sold off because again, after all, Jews were never considered a part of the cultural fabric of the city.
In closing, let me make a few observations about the frontier between Germany and Poland, and the territorial losses that both suffered because of WWII. The Potsdam Agreement between the United States, the United Kingdom, and the Soviet Union concluded on the 2nd of August 1945, in anticipation of a final peace treaty, placed the German territories east of the Oder-Neisse line under Polish administration. All Germans remaining in the old and new Poland, it was decided, should be expelled. The Oder-Neisse line marked the border between the former East Germany and Poland from 1950 to 1990. The then-two Communist governments agreed to the border in 1950, while then-West Germany, after a period of refusal, conceded with reservations in 1970. Notwithstanding West Germany’s misgivings about this frontier, with the reunification of Germany, they eventually agreed to it when the German-Polish Border Treaty was signed on the 14th of November 1990.
Ultimately, Poland for its loss to the Soviet Union of 72,000 sq. miles (187,000 sq. km.) of lands east of the Curzon line was compensated with 43,000 sq. miles (112,000 sq. km.) of former German territory. The final borders resulted in Germany’s loss to Poland of most of Silesia, half of Pomerania, the eastern portion of Brandenburg, a small part of Saxony, and part of East Prussia. The northern part of East Prussia, including Königsberg [today: Kaliningrad, Russia], was annexed by the Soviet Union, while Memelland became part of the Lithuanian Soviet Socialist Republic, today Lithuania. (Figure 14)
Thus, while we may wish to believe frontiers and borders are immutable, as we’ve seen in just the past nine years since Russia annexed the Crimean Peninsula, they are ever-changing and much more fluid than we would expect.
REFERENCES
Dafoe, Taylor. “Before Retreating from Kherson, Russian Troops Emptied One of Ukraine’s Top Museum of Nearly 15,000 Objects.” Artnet News, 14 Nov. 2022, https://news.artnet.com/art-world/russian-troops-loot-kherson-museum-2209777
Geanous, Jacob. “Russian art curators have reportedly helped loot dozens of Ukraine museums.” New York Post, 4 Feb. 2023, https://flipboard.com/article/russian-art-curators-have-reportedly-helped-loot-dozens-of-ukraine-museums/f-1f12bf14a5%2Fnypost.com
Grutchot, Katarzyna (ed.) “Od Joannitow Do Ratownikow—Czyli Dzieje Strazakow Ziemi Raciborskiej.” (“From the Joanites to the rescuers or the history of firefighters of the Racibórz Land”). Nowiny Publishing House.
Note: The Blog post is about Berlin’s Jewish Community Hospital that inexplicably outlasted the Nazis, and its wartime Director, Dr. Walter Lustig, born in Ratibor, Germany, the same town where my father was born.
This post has to do with my family only insofar as Dr. Walter Lustig, the man at the center of this story, was born in Ratibor [today: Racibórz, Poland], the town in Upper Silesia where my father and many of his family were born. From around 1942 until shortly after WWII ended in April 1945 Dr. Lustig was the Director of Berlin’s Krankenhaus der Jüdischen Gemeinde, the Hospital of the Jewish Community, a Jewish institution that miraculously withstood the Nazi onslaught.
This assault on German Jews left only between 5,000 and 6,000 Jews alive in Germany by the end of the war, compared to 500,000 Jews living there towards the end of the Weimar Republic in 1933 when the Nazis seized power. By the time WWII started in 1939 two-thirds of these Jews had emigrated, though there still remained roughly 167,000 Jews in Germany in 1941, most of whom would be murdered.
Berlin’s Jewish Hospital is 265 years old. It was originally built in 1756 on Oranienburger Strasse near the Jewish cemetery in Berlin. Then, during Berlin’s mid-nineteenth century economic expansion that was due in large measure to its entrepreneurial Jewish population, the Jewish community built the city’s first general hospital, one of the largest of its kind, on Auguststrasse; it was built primarily to serve the needs of the Jewish population. As the years passed, even this structure proved inadequate, so in 1913, the current hospital along Iranischestrasse opened on the site it occupies today (Figure 1); there were seven principal buildings, together with ancillary structures. Presently, the hospital is located in the Wedding locality in the borough of “Berlin-Mitte” (Figure 2), which prior to 2001 was a separate borough in the northwestern part of Berlin.
I have briefly mentioned Berlin’s Jewish Hospital in connection with three previous Blog posts. In Posts 48 and 49, I related the story of how one of my distant relatives, Dr. Ernst Neisser, was taken there on the morning of October 1, 1942, following his attempted suicide after being told to report to an “old age transport,” a euphemism for deportation to a concentration camp; fortunately, he survived only three days until October 4th before succumbing to his trauma. I say “fortunately” because the fear among Jews who attempted suicide is they would be resuscitated only to then be shipped to a concentration camp and gassed there.
According to a Jerusalem Post article by Judy Siegel-Itzkovich, published on June 23, 2007, entitled “A hospital with history,” numerous Berlin Jews, like Dr. Ernst Neisser, who attempted suicide with gas or sleeping pills in the face of deportations ended up in Berlin’s Jewish Hospital for treatment, the only hospital that would still treat Jews during the Nazi era. According to this article, upwards of 7,000 Berlin Jews killed themselves before the Nazi dictatorship fell. Although Jews committed suicide in all sorts of ways, by far the most common method involved the ingestion of a poison such as potassium cyanide or an overdose of an opiate or sedative, usually Veronal.
Then, in Post 107, I mentioned an English lady named Kathy York, whose grandmother Maria Wundsch née Pauly (Figure 3), a distant relative of mine, worked at Berlin’s Jewish Hospital during WWII when Dr. Lustig was the Director there. Kathy tells me letters written about her grandmother’s fraught time working at the hospital exist, but these have yet to surface.
I previously also told readers about Daniel B. Silver’s book about the hospital, entitled, “Refuge in Hell: How Berlin’s Jewish Hospital Outlasted the Nazis.” I have relied heavily on this book in describing Dr. Lustig’s tenure as Director of the hospital and the hospital’s situation during the war. It is not my intention here to thoroughly review what interested followers can easily read for themselves, but rather to bring to light a few findings and connections I made on my own that add a little to the story. This said, some background about Dr. Walter Lustig and his wartime administration of the hospital are warranted.
After fierce street-to-street fighting against entrenched remnants of Hitler’s SS, on April 24, 1945, Russian soldiers had finally succeeded in wresting control from the Nazis of a stretch of Iranischestrasse that included the battle-scarred buildings of the “Krankenhaus Der Jüdischen Gemeinde” (Hospital of The Jewish Community). There they found hundreds of people including doctors, nurses, patients, workmen, and others who claimed to be Jewish. The Russians did not initially give credence to their assertions believing Joseph Goebbels’ 1943 declaration, chief propagandist for the Nazi party, that Berlin was “Judenrein,” or “Judenfrei,” meaning “cleansed (or free) of Jews,” according to National Socialist terminology applied in the “Final Solution of the Jewish Question.” Eventually the survivors convinced their Russian liberators they were Jews who had inexplicably outlasted the Nazis.
At the time of liberation, three of the hospital’s seven main buildings were no longer a part of the hospital. In late 1942, the German Army, the Wehrmacht, had expropriated the nurses’ residence, the Schwesterheim, as well as buildings that had housed the gynecology and infectious disease departments, for use as a military hospital, the Lazarett. Then, in 1944, the Gestapo appropriated and fenced off the hospital’s pathology laboratory and an adjacent gatehouse to use as a Sammellager, a collection camp for Jewish deportees. By 1944, most of Berlin’s remaining Jews had already been deported so a single, smaller holding facility now sufficed.
According to Daniel B. Silver, several published sources report the hospital’s population at the time of liberation at around 800. However, Hilda Kahan, Dr. Lustig’s secretary throughout his tenure as Director of the Jewish Community Hospital, states in a videotaped interview that the number was closer 500. Regardless of the precise number, they represented a large proportion of Germany’s identifiable Jews as they were defined by the Nazis. Statistics a young Jewish woman was compelled to maintain for the Gestapo on a monthly basis indicate only 6,284 known Jews remained in Berlin on February 28, 1945. (Silver, 2003, p. 2)
Included in the final number of Jews found at the Hospital upon its liberation, according to Daniel Silver “. . .were patients and members of the medical, nursing, and support staff who had taken up residence in the hospital at various times, either because they had been bombed out or evicted as Jews from their former homes or because they were slave laborers assigned to work at the hospital. Also on hand were the remnants of groups of Jews who had been transferred to the hospital when the Nazis closed other Jewish institutions in Germany, such as orphanages and old age homes. Most of these unfortunates had been deported before the war ended, but some remained in April 1945. Among them were a handful of abandoned children who were suspected of being fully Jewish but whose ‘racial’ status had not been definitively determined. The Nazis had used the hospital as a kind of ghetto to which they consigned Jews who had nowhere else to live or whose status was ambiguous. These included Jews of foreign nationality and Jews who were being held there as potential bargaining chips in negotiating exchanges for German nationals captured in Palestine. The authorities also used the hospital to house Jews who had been brought to Berlin from other cities in Germany as part of a Nazi effort to separate them from their Aryan spouses. This was intended as a first step in overcoming the political and legal barriers to the deportation of Jewish men who lived in mixed marriages and whose Aryan spouses refused to divorce them despite Gestapo pressure to do so.” (2003, p. 8) As Winter further notes, “Most of the hospital population were half-Jews or spouses of Aryans. As such, they had been protected by Nazi rules that everyone knew could be changed at any time.” (2003, p. 12)
Also included among the “patients” were several Jews not receiving medical treatment who were protected from deportation by one or another prominent Nazi; this may have included Jews who had illicit affairs with well-placed Nazis, childhood friends of important Nazis who sought to protect them, Jews who had bribed high-ranking Nazis, or other cases whose reasons can only be guessed. A “lucky” group of survivors included Jews who had been incarcerated in the hospital’s auxiliary police ward, the so-called Polizeistation. These were Jews who fell ill while already in the hands of the police, Gestapo, or SS who for unknown reasons the Nazis sought to restore to health before killing them. Unbelievable!
My family’s remote association to Berlin’s Jewish Community Hospital and its miraculous survival through WWII, in addition to the hospital’s wartime Director’s connection to Ratibor, the same town in Upper Silesia where my father was born, drew my interest in writing this Blog post. Hoping I might be able to add a little to what has already been written and is known about Dr. Walter Lustig, I contacted Mr. Paul Newerla (Figure 4), my retired lawyer friend from Racibórz who now researches and writes about the history of the town and Silesia and asked whether he could track down a copy of Dr. Walter Lustig’s birth certificate at the archive. Paul graciously agreed to help. He not only was able to locate Dr. Lustig’s birth certificate, but the Racibórz archives also provided a legal document related to Dr. Walter Lustig’s father, Bernhard Lustig, dated the 22nd of March 1939. I will discuss this in further detail below.
First, let me tell readers a little about Walter Lustig. He was born as Walter Simon Lustig on the 10th of August 1891 in Ratibor, the son of the merchant Bernhard Lustig and his wife Regina Lustig née Besser. He graduated from the local gymnasium in March 1910 and enrolled at the University of Breslau in October of the same year. He studied medicine, specializing in surgery, and received his medical degree and license in the spring of 1915. He was drafted during WWI and served as a military doctor. During his wartime stint, he obtained a Ph.D., also in medicine. His military service was performed in Breslau, where he treated casualties from the eastern front. After the war he worked in public administration while maintaining a private medical practice; he spent most of his career as a medical administrator. He wrote prolifically on medical subjects.
Clearly driven to advance professionally, in 1927 he relocated to Berlin. His move there coincided with two changes that had far-reaching consequences. He married a non-Jewish physician, Dr. Annemarie Preuss, and took a job with the Berlin police department where he became acquainted with Fritz Wöhrn and Rolf Günther who eventually became Adolf Eichmann’s key aides in overseeing the hospital. It was Adolf Eichmann’s department in the Reichssicherbeitshauptamt (RSHA), the Reich Security Main Office, that had formal jurisdiction over the Jewish hospital.
According to Daniel Silver, Lustig “. . .advanced within the police hierarchy until in 1929 he was appointed to the position of director of the Police Presidium’s medical affairs department. He held the prestigious bureaucratic titles of Oberregierungsrat (chief administrative counselor) and Obermedizinalrat (chief medical counselor).” (2003, p. 24-25) The police department had broad administrative responsibilities that extended beyond criminal matters, and included overseeing health matters in schools, institutions, and group care facilities, and conducting occupational training for medical personnel; suffice it to say, this brought Lustig into contact with many senior government officials and leaders in the medical community.
In October 1933, Lustig lost his job because of the issuance of the Nazis’ Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service (“Gesetz zur Wiederherstellung des Berufsbeamtentums”). This law initially exempted veterans of WWI such as Lustig but because he had been stationed in Breslau and not on the eastern front, the exemption did not apply to him, and he lost his position. At some time, between 1933 and 1935 Lustig was employed by the health department of the Berlin Jewish Gemeinde, or community (more on this below). According to Daniel Silver, when exactly Lustig was employed by the Gemeinde, and what his exact duties were are unknown, though he apparently became active in matters relating to the Jewish hospital around this time. Regardless, Lustig proved as adept at rising in the official Jewish bureaucracy at the Gemeinde as he had rising through the ranks of the Berlin police department.
Without overwhelming readers with the tangled structure of the Jewish community, it is still worth reviewing the hospital’s situation following the events of Kristallnacht that took place on the 9-10 November 1938 to provide context for Dr. Lustig’s powerful administrative position during the war. In a structure that prevailed before the Nazis came to power and still exists today, every religious denomination was organized into a Gemeinde, depending on context, roughly translated as community, municipality, congregation, or parish. Prior to the Nazis seizing power in 1933, the Gemeinde in smaller cities resisted the formation of a central Jewish organization fearing it would be dominated by the Berlin Gemende. Eventually the reality of the Nazi takeover overtook regional concerns, and a central organization called the Reichsvertretung der deutschen Juden, or Central Representation of German Jews, was formed. It was renamed after 1935 to “Jews in Germany,” a significant distinction meant to signal that Jews were no longer to be considered Germans.
As the remaining German Jews became more concentrated in Berlin over time, the distinction between the Berlin Gemeinde and the Reichsvertretung became blurrier with many officials holding parallel positions in both organizations. After Kristallnacht, the Reichsvertretung was dissolved by the Nazis, only to be resurrected when the Nazis realized this organization facilitated emigration, which at the time the Nazis were encouraging. Consequently, a new Jewish central organization was organized, substituting the word Reichsvereinigung (central organization) for Reichsvertretung (central representation). Membership in this organization was compulsory for every Jew, which was created to better discriminate against and control the Jewish population. It was under tight Gestapo supervision.
Daniel Silver summarizes the hospital’s situation by 1941: “So it was that by 1941 the hospital functioned under the organization umbrella of the Reichsvereiningung, although, through the Gemeinde health department, it still maintained a formal relationship to the Berlin Gemeinde. The most important aspect of the new arrangements that began in 1938 was that, through the Reichsvereiningung, the hospital was placed under the direct supervision of Department IV B 4 of the RSHA. Originally this had been the department in charge of ‘Jewish emigration and evacuation.’ By 1941 it had become the department for ‘Jewish affairs and evacuation,’ emigration having been largely abandoned as a Nazi objective. Its head was Adolf Eichmann, the bureaucratic mastermind of the Final Solution.” (2003, p. 40)
Measures taken against Jewish professionals which began in 1933 with passage of the Nuremberg racial laws that pushed Jewish doctors out of jobs in non-Jewish clinics had a profound effect on the makeup of the Jewish hospital’s professional staff as it stood in 1941. Things came to a head with the decree of July 25, 1938, when all Jewish physicians, of which there were about 3,000 at the time in the Reich, were stripped of their medical licenses. By September, a limit of 700 Jewish physicians, referred to by the degrading title of Krankenbehandler, or “carer for the sick,” were restricted to treating Jewish patients or working in Jewish institutions.
Ironically, one of the beneficiaries of this provision was Walter Lustig. While many of Lustig’s contemporaries had by 1938 decided to emigrate, he consciously decided not to do so. Whether this was hubris or his marriage to an Aryan that he thought afforded him some protection or his previous relationship with Nazis during his days in the Berlin police department, Lustig benefited from others’ departures to rise in the Jewish hierarchy. Daniel Silver describes it as follows: “When his boss in the Gemeinde/Reichsvereinigung health department, Erich Seligmann, left Germany for the United States in 1939, Lustig took over his position. In July 1939, the Jüdisches Nachrichtenblatt (Jewish chronicle) described him as the person who henceforth would be responsible for health matters within the Reichsvereinigung. In that capacity, he played a key role in filling vacancies that opened up at the hospital because of the emigration of members of the medical staff. At some point in 1940 or 1941 (exactly when is unclear), he was appointed as the Gesundheitsdesernent, or chief of the health department (of the Gemeinde), and thus became a member of the governing board of the Reichsvereinigung.” (2003, p. 43)
Eventually in around October 1942, Walter Lustig became the hospital’s director after the previous director Dr. Schoenfeld and his wife killed themselves; they had been among 100 Gemeinde and Reichsvereinigung officials handpicked in the second major deportation of communal officials, a selection Lustig was compelled to participate in after initially demurring. From 1942 onward, he was repeatedly forced to aid in the selection of hospital staff for deportation, and according to Daniel Silver was “. . .arguably the most powerful figure of German Jewry and the absolute master of the hospital.”
Again, quoting Daniel Silver, “For many, Lustig’s name evokes predominantly negative feelings. According to one source, ‘The name Walter Lustig awakens even today vigorous aversion among Jewish witnesses of the events.’ Yet even his detractors give grudging credit to his talents and to his accomplishment in keeping the hospital open through the final years of the Nazi regime. His contemporaries describe him in wildly differing terms—turncoat and Gestapo collaborator; savior of the hospital; the man who sent hundreds of Jews to their death; the man who saved hundreds of Jews from the camps; a protector of children; a lecher.” (2003, p. 26) Further complicating how Lustig is viewed in hindsight is the criticism that he was unsympathetic to the plight of his fellow Jews and that he was a Jewish anti-Semite, and that his mistresses may have influenced the people he selected for deportation. More on his purported anti-Semitism below.
At the time Mr. Winter published his book in 2003, he stated there were no known pictures of Walter Lustig. (2003, p. 26) While writing this Blog post, I was able to establish email contact with Daniel Winter, who formerly served as the general counsel to the National Security Agency and the Central Intelligence Service. He mentioned that following the publication of his book students from the University of Potsdam, outside Berlin, found a picture of Walter Lustig while developing a traveling exhibit about Berlin’s Jewish Hospital. Unable to locate his copy of this image, I have separately contacted the University of Potsdam hoping they might find and send me one. I’m optimistic about sharing it with readers in the future.
Relatedly, about ten years ago, I attended a talk sponsored by the Los Angeles Jewish Genealogical Society given by a Mr. Roger Lustig (Figure 5), who specializes in research on Jewish families of Prussian Poland, and is a top expert on general German Jewish research. This talk was given just before my planned 13-week trip to Europe to follow in the footsteps of my Jewish family’s diaspora. I contacted Roger asking whether he might be able to refer me to someone in Racibórz who could help me. Because Roger also has ancestors from there, he was happy to assist. Over the years, we’ve periodically stayed in touch. Naturally assuming that Roger might in some way be related to Walter Lustig because of the common surname and their respective connections to Ratibor, while writing this Blog post, I asked him whether he might have Walter’s photograph. He was unable to help explaining that because Dr. Lustig was a short man, about 5’2”, he was self-conscious about being photographed. This comports with how informants described Lustig to Daniel Silver, namely, that he was small. (2003, p. 26) Others added that he was a “small, delicate person” and that he had “cold stabbing eyes—terrible eyes.” Another informant reported that Lustig was very Germanic in appearance, a man who “‘looked like a major from the First World War,’ with spectacles and a big moustache.” (2003, p. 26)
Roger Lustig pointed out something interesting to me during our recent exchange that speaks to whether Walter was anti-Semite. While writing his book, Silver coincidentally interviewed Roger Lustig’s father, Ernst Lustig, who addressed this question (i.e., Ernst Lustig’s great-great-grandfather was the brother of Walter Lustig’s great-grandfather (2003, p. 176)): “The characterization of Lustig as a Jewish anti-Semite is at odds with the reaction of his distant cousin Ernst Lustig. In a brief and anguished commentary on the judgment in the Wöhrn trial, Ernst Lustig expresses surprise and shock at the unfavorable way Walter Lustig is described. ‘What is difficult for me to comprehend,’ he writes, ‘is how this man could develop such a horrible attitude toward Jews when he himself was a flawless Jew.’ He remembers his cousin as a man who maintained friendly relations with his Jewish relatives, a man whom he knew as ‘Uncle Walter,’ and a man who once provided Ernst’s father with a genealogical sketch of the family that descended from Dr. Lustig’s great-grandfather Abraham, who had lived in the town of Adamowitz. This seems out of character with the picture of Walter Lustig as a man who took no interest in his Jewish roots, although it is true that the time in question, 1937-38, was already after the date when Walter Lustig decided to throw his lot in with the Jewish community to which the Nazis in any event had irrevocably assigned him.” (2003, p. 215)
It is difficult to reconcile the differing judgements of Walter Lustig. On the one hand, there is the man who selected colleagues and fellow employees for deportation, while on the other was a man who occasionally came to the rescue of assistants who’d been arrested by the Nazis. Then, in March 1943, the Gestapo showed up with trucks in front of the administrative building prepared to deport the entire establishment, patients, doctors, nurses, and all other employees; it was only Lustig’s call to Adolf Eichmann that forced the Gestapo to stand down, though it resulted in fully half of Lustig’s workmates being arrested. As Silver asks, “Did Lustig originate this Faustian bargain, offering up fully half of the total number of his professional colleagues and employees as the price for saving the hospital, and thereby himself and his job? Or was this decision imposed on him in circumstances over he which he had no control whatsoever? It is unlikely that anyone will ever know.” (2003, p. 143)
It is worth noting that while the RSHA and the Gestapo were technically part of the same organization and under the authority of the same leader, SS Führer Heinrich Himmler, the German bureaucracy was teeming with internal rivalries and tensions (2003, p. 141), a situation which may partially explain why the Jewish hospital survived the war. For all of Lustig’s purported influence with the Gestapo, he was unable to save his own father from being deported to Theresienstadt in 1943. (2003, p. 173 & p. 221)
Longtime followers of my Blog may recall the postscript to Post 13 about the former Jewish Cemetery in Ratibor. In that post, I explained the role a Polish gentleman named Mr. Kazimierz Świetliński played in photographing all the headstones of the graves before the cemetery was demolished during Poland’s Communist Era. At a time when purchasing film and processing black-and-white negatives cost a lot,Kazimierz photographed, developed, created a portfolio with a site plan, and donated all his work to the Muzeum Raciborzu to be archived. After learning about these images, I arranged to photograph all the images in 2015. Recalling these and the accompanying Excel database, I scrolled through them and discovered they include a photo of Walter Lustig’s mother’s headstone, Regina Lustig née Besser. (Figure 6) As mentioned above, Walter’s father, Bernhard Lustig, was deported to Theresienstadt where he died, so obviously no picture of his gravestone exists.
Walter’s birth certificate, which my dear friend Mr. Paul Newerla was able to obtain from the Racibórz archives confirmed Walter’s date of birth, the 10th of August 1891, and his parentage. (Figures 7a-b) As I mentioned above, while Paul was searching for Walter Lustig’s birth certificate, the archives stumbled upon a legal document related to Bernhard Lustig dated the 22nd of March 1939. (Figures 8a-g) At the time Bernhard was 82 years of age indicating he’d been born in 1857; I would later learn he was born on the 6th of February 1857. Because he was in frail health at the time, Bernhard Lustig had requested that a Mr. Arthur “Israel” Stein be appointed as his guardian, which the courts granted. Despite his failing health, four years later the Nazis deported him to Theresienstadt, where he perished. One can only imagine the cruel circumstances under which Bernhard died.
Interestingly, the legal document Bernhard submitted to the court also requested that he be allowed to submit a corrected declaration of value for assets he’d mistakenly overvalued; this resulted in overpayment of the “Jewish expiation tax,” for which he sought reimbursement. It seems unlikely the courts ever acted upon this request.
From 1945 to the present, most people have expressed incredulity that the Nazis permitted an identifiable Jewish institution to continue to exist in Berlin, a city Goebbels had declared in 1943 “cleansed of Jews.” Mr. Silver offers possible explanations: 1) the Nazis saw the hospital as playing a useful role in the large-scale deportations during a time when all other Jewish organizations and institutions had been eliminated (2003, p. 62); 2) earlier in the war, before the large-scale deportation of most Jews, it is possible the Nazis allowed the hospital to survive to provide for the treatment of Jews who could spread epidemics to the general Aryan population (2003, p. 235-6); 3) for bureaucratic convenience, that’s to say, as a place in which the Gestapo could establish a kind of ghetto (2003, p. 237); and 4) for reasons of ambition, Adolf Eichmann may have stage-managed the transfer of the land and buildings the hospital occupied to a small powerless agency, the Academy of Youth Medicine, which he could easily control and thereby preserve the hospital and the site he coveted. (2003, p. 238)
Let me end this lengthy post by briefly discussing what is known about Walter Lustig’s fate. Following the war, the hospital fell into the Soviet-administered zone of Berlin. By then, Lustig had been appointed by the occupation-controlled local government as the director of health services for the Wedding district and had turned over the administration of the hospital to his aide Ehrich Zwilsky. Incredibly, Lustig had remained head of the Reichsvereinigung and had even petitioned the Soviet authorities to have it converted to the new Jewish Gemeinde, with himself as the head. His ambition clearly clouded his judgement; a more prudent course might have compelled him to flee, given the overall negative verdict by many who worked with him and thought he was a turncoat and Gestapo collaborator. Regardless, in June 1945, according to Ruth Bileski, a young Jewish woman sent in 1943 as a forced laborer to work in Lustig’s office, he was taken away accompanied by two uniformed Soviet officers, never to be seen again. Some claim he may have stage-managed his own disappearance to avoid being tried, although the likelier outcome is that he was killed by the Soviets.
REFERENCES
Siegel-Itzkovich, Judy. “A hospital with history.” Jerusalem Post, June 23, 2007, https://cc.bingj.com/cache.aspx?q=Siegel-Itzkovich%2c+Judy.+%e2%80%9cA+hospital+with+history&d=4898311699633967&mkt=en-US&setlang=en-US&w=KvOBC3e8wZezfu1SQux0Q8WOOLP6t1uU
Silver, Daniel B. Refuge in Hell: How Berlin’s Jewish Hospital Outlasted the Nazis. Houghton Mifflin, 2003.
Note: In this post I relate the story of how in the process of helping a reader whose grandmother died in 1940 in Ratibor, the birthplace of my father, I improbably discovered information on some of my own ancestors.
Ratibor [today: Racibórz, Poland] (Figure 1), the town in the Prussian province of Upper Silesia where my father, Dr. Otto Bruck, was born in 1907 was one of the largest municipalities in the region. Periodically, readers who are descended from former inhabitants of Ratibor will contact me through my Blog asking for information I have or may have come across related to their ancestors. Often, their relatives are entirely unknown to me but seeing what, if anything, I can uncover about them becomes an extension of my own forensic genealogical endeavors. And, the pleasure I derive in helping others is sometimes magnified when I learn something about my own ancestors in the process. The inspiration for the current post stems from precisely such a situation.
One reader, Dan Ward, recently contacted me after perusing Post 13 and Post 13, Postscript, and learning the “Muzeum w Raciborzu” in Racibórz had given me an Excel spreadsheet with the names of the Jews that had once been interred in the former Jewish Cemetery in Ratibor, requesting a copy of this database. This cemetery was demolished in the 1960’s during Poland’s Communist era to further expunge evidence of German residency in the area. Fortunately, before the stout headstones were torn down and sold off locally, a Polish gentleman whom I wrote about in Post 13, Postscript, Mr. Kazimierz Świetliński (Figure 2), had the foresight to photograph all the gravestones; these images served as the basis for the creation of the Excel database, with the Racibórz Museum staff gleaning as much vital information as possible from the high-quality snapshots. Despite the sharp and fine details on the photos, not all the data is discernible. More on this below.
Dan Ward contacted me seeking information on the tombstone and burial location of his grandmother, Rosa Wartenberger née Perl, who according to records he found was buried on the 29th of March 1940 in the Jüdischer Friedhof Ratibor, Jewish Cemetery in Ratibor, in Plot 153; she died or committed suicide before she was scheduled to be deported to a concentration camp. As a quick aside, the “Ward” surname is clearly the Anglicized version of the “Wartenberger” family name. Dan sent me screen shots with the source of this information, Jewish Gen. As readers can see, Rosa Wartenberger’s name was misspelled as “Risa Wortenberger,” although the transcriber obviously had trouble deciphering the script. (Figure 3)
Armed with the information Dan sent me, I immediately began my own research. The first thing I checked was the Excel spreadsheet with the names of Jews formerly buried in the Jewish Cemetery in Ratibor, and Rosa Wartenberg is not listed. Dan would later tell me his grandmother’s maiden name was “Perl,” and I found four individuals with this surname once interred in the Jewish graveyard, but being unfamiliar with Dan’s family tree, I am not sure how they might have been related to her.
Next, I checked address books and phone directories for Ratibor. I have previously told readers about a database on ancestry.com, entitled “Germany and Surrounding Areas, Address Books, 1815-1974 (Adressbücher aus Deutschland und Umgebung, 1815-1974),” with address books for Germany, Poland, and other neighboring countries. In the only address book in this database for Ratibor for the year 1938, I found a single “Wartenberger.” It was for a man named “Kurt Wartenberger,” identified as a “gastwirt,” innkeeper, shown living at “Breite Straße 54.” (Figure 4)
I asked my friend Mr. Paul Newerla from Racibórz, a retired lawyer whom regular readers have often heard me mention, who now researches and writes about the history of Silesia, whether the surname “Wartenberger” is familiar to him. It is not, but in a 1926 Ratibor Address Book not included among the “Germany and Surrounding Areas” directories, he too found “Kurt Wartenberger” listed, identified then as a “destillateur,” distiller, living at “Brunken 54.” (Figure 5) Other than finding Kurt Wartenberger’s name in the 1926 Ratibor directory, Paul could add nothing more.
I found it odd the address number “54” was identical in 1926 and 1938 but that the street names were different. Paul Newerla explained that “Brunken” was a connecting street to what is referred to as the Altendorf district, that’s to say, a little “outside” of Ratibor along the main road towards Oppeln [today: Opole, Poland] and Leobschutz [today: Głubczyce, Poland]. I located this street, respectively, on plan maps of Ratibor from 1927-28 (Figure 6) and 1933 (Figure 7), although a plan map from 1914 names it “Große-Vorstadt.” (Figure 8) In tiny print on all three plan maps, readers can see the number “54,” confirming it was the same corner lot with different street names over time.
I passed along what Paul and I had found to Dan Ward. He confirmed that Kurt had owned a tavern and that family papers in his possession place Kurt’s business at “Große-Vorstadt 54,” papers which must clearly pre-date 1927-28, by which time the street was known as “Brunken.” By 1938, the street had been renamed yet again because it was then called “Breite Straße.” According to Dan, Kurt Wartenberger was murdered in the Shoah in Buchenwald, and, indeed, Yad Vashem lists him as a victim of the Holocaust. (Figure 9)
Next, I retraced Dan Ward’s steps to track down the source of the information on his grandmother, misspelled as mentioned above as “Risa Wortenberger.” The data, as I previously also said, originates from JewishGen, and relocating it was straight-forward. Here, however, is where things took an interesting turn. The source documentation for the data in JewishGen comes from elsewhere, namely, from the Church of Latter-Day Saints’ (LDS) “Family History Library International Film 1184447, Item 2” (Figure 10), which is one of three microfilm rolls with data on the former Jewish inhabitants of Ratibor. While I had last examined this microfilm many years ago, when it was still necessary to order films from the LDS Church in Salt Lake City and have hard copies sent to a local Family History Library for viewing, I clearly remembered this roll as having limited or, at least, confusing information. Now that the Ratibor records are accessible online through familysearch.org, I decided to reexamine film 1184447.
For anyone interested in seeking similar information from familysearch.org for towns they are researching, they can replicate these steps:
1) Go to familysearch.org (you can create a free account);
2) Under the “Search” button, scroll down to “Catalog,” click enter, and go to the following page;
3) Next, type in “Raciborz” under “Place,” or whatever town you are seeking records for (i.e., different spellings yield different results, so for towns that are now located in different countries than they once were, you may need to try alternate spellings);
4) Scroll down to “Poland, Opole, Racibórz (Racibórz),” then hit “Search”;
5) Select “Poland, Opole, Racibórz (Racibórz) – Jewish records (1),” hit enter;
6) Next select “Matrikel, 1814-1940”;
7) On the next screen select “1184447, Item 2” (select the camera icon all the way to the right; if there is a key above a camera icon, the microfilm is unavailable online).
There are 342 pages on Microfilm 1184447 but only pages 220 through 338, referred to as “Item 2,” specifically deal with Ratibor. The film contains “Friedhofsurkunden 1888-1940” for Ratibor, which Peter Hanke, my German friend who helps me with translations and making sense of German records, tells me is more aptly referred to as “Friedhofsdokumente,” or cemetery documents. The cemetery administration would use these files to see which tombs were unused; which ones could be reused after 25 or 30 years if descendants stopped paying to keep their ancestors interred; which tombs were reserved in perpetuity for so-called “family graves”; or simply to help visitors locate specific graves. These files often contain useful information for genealogists, as I illustrate below.
Let me digress for a moment. Given the disparate sources of ancestral information I have accessed over the years, including in this current post, I am often reminded of the American television game show “Concentration” that aired from 1958 until 1991. Basically, the game was based on the children’s memory game of the same name. Players had to match cards which represented prizes they could win. As matching pairs of cards were gradually removed from the board, it would slowly reveal a rebus puzzle that contestants had to solve to win a match. The similarity I see with genealogical research is not so much solving the rebus, but matching pairs of cards. Often years pass before a “genealogical card” I newly discover can be “matched” to one or more I found earlier in my investigations. The challenge, particularly as I get older, is retrieving the earlier “card” from my memory. Such is the case with connections to Microfilm 1184447, Item 2.
I downloaded, saved, and studied all 119 pages from this film, and made several interesting discoveries and connections. Of immediate interest, I found Rosa Wartenberger’s name in an index (Figure 11); as readers can discern from what I have circled in Figure 11, the number “46” appears to the right of Rosa’s name; this refers to the page number in the “Friedhofsdokumente,” on which Rosa’s name and interment date appear. Initially, I found only one page 46, not realizing there was a left page-right page pair.
Let me briefly explain. When the LDS Church originally photographed vital records for Ratibor and other places, they typically started by photographing the left-side pages from the front to the back of the register, then in reverse order from the back to the front photographed the right-side pages; thus, the left page-right page pairs, either identically numbered or consecutively numbered, from any register will not be found on consecutive microfilm images. Thus, while Rosa’s name does not appear on the left-hand page 46, it is found on the right-hand page 46; for reader’s ease, I have “grafted” the two pages in one (Figure 12), and translated, using a different grafted left-right pair of pages, the headers for each column. (Figure 13)
As readers can see, by “Grabnummer,” grave number, 153, the date of Rosa’s interment is shown, the 29th of March 1940, which matches the information in JewishGen. The column titled “Belegt” translates to “occupied,” and signifies when a person was interred, rather than when they died.
Once a researcher understands the organizational “structure” of microfilms with cemetery documents, they are easy though tedious to use. On one left-right pair of pages, I was able to find both sets of great-grandparents on my father’s side. (Figure 14) Oddly, the names of Fedor Bruck (Figure 15) and his wife, Friederike Bruck née Mockrauer (Figure 16), are not found in the Excel spreadsheet at the Muzeum w Raciborzu, meaning no photo of their headstone was taken. However, Hermann Berliner (Figure 17) and Olga Berliner née Braun’s names do appear in the Excel spreadsheet indicating a picture of their gravestone exists. (Figure 18)
I know from a family tree in the Pinkus Family Collection at the Leo Baeck Institute that my great-grandmother Friederike Bruck née Mockrauer died in Berlin on the 29th of February 1924 (Figure 19), though she was not buried there. From Microfilm 1184447, I learned she was instead interred on the 11th of May 1924 in Ratibor, almost 10 weeks later, presumably alongside her husband. Jews are typically interred within two to three days after they die, so a 10-week delay is very unusual. (Figure 20)
On Microfilm 1184447, I also found a single page mentioning one of my father’s older brothers who died in infancy, Walter Bruck. (Figure 21) His name is found on a page entitled “Kleiner Kinderfriedhof,” small children’s cemetery. This is further proof of his existence. A brief explanation. After I began immersing myself in family history and creating a family tree years ago, I started to wonder why there was a nine-year age difference between my father’s oldest brother, Fedor Bruck, born in 1895, and my father’s older sister, Susanne Bruck, born in 1904, in an era where families were large. I eventually learned in 2014 when I visited the “Archiwum Państwowe w Katowicach Oddział w Raciborzu” (“State Archives in Katowice Branch in Raciborz”) that another sibling had been born in 1900 (Figure 22) who died in infancy the next year (Figure 23), named Walter Bruck. I was able to retrieve both his birth and death certificates among the civil records archived at the Archiwum Państwowe. Thus, the discovery of Walter Bruck’s name on Microfilm 1184447 was confirmation he was once buried in the Jüdischer Friedhof Ratibor.
Among the photos that Mr. Kazimierz Świetliński took at the former Jewish Cemetery in Ratibor before it was demolished is one showing the “Kindergräber,” children’s graves. (Figure 24) As readers can see, the children’s names on some of the headstones can be made out, though most are indecipherable. Interestingly, there is a separate index on Microfilm 1184447, entitled “Großer kinderfriedhof,” big children’s cemetery (Figure 25), with the names of older children buried in the Jewish Cemetery. Infants may have been interred in graves identified only by number, as I discovered in the Weißensee Jewish Cemetery in Berlin.
As a tedious exercise for another day, which I started while researching and writing this post, is cross-checking the names on Microfilm 1184447 with those on the Excel spreadsheet. Some names on Microfilm 1184447 are not in the Excel database, while others are found in both. Preliminarily, I was able to amend death dates or years in the Excel directory, which, as previously mentioned, was compiled from photos, some of which are indistinct.
In closing, I would say one final thing. Based on the Excel index I obtained years ago, I mistakenly concluded then that none of my Bruck relatives had ever been interred in the Jewish Cemetery in Ratibor, even though I knew some died there when the cemetery was still in use. However, with the benefit of the information I recently acquired from the Jewish records on Microfilm 1184447, I am certain that at least three relatives with the Bruck surname were once buried there. And, this discovery was spurred by helping a reader learn about one of his relatives, a case of helping yourself by aiding others, a most satisfying outcome!
Note: In this post, I discuss a recently obtained list of students who attended Ratibor’s Gymnasium, or high school, between its opening in 1819 and 1849, and facts I’ve gleaned from this registry. While I expected a linear unfolding of the ledger’s contents and information, in some ways it has turned into a game of three-dimensional chess, as I’ll explain. This post also provides an opportunity to lay out the exacting approach I try and take to make a case for ancestral connections relying on primary source documents.
One of the most exciting moments doing forensic genealogy occurs when you discover a copy or original historic document with the names of your ancestors, particularly when the names are those of your oldest known relatives. As a former archaeologist, this is analogous to unearthing an artifact that was last handled by a human hundreds if not thousands of years ago. The context in which an artifact or document is found is key to properly interpreting its significance.
Last year, Mr. Paul Newerla, my friend from Ratibor, retired lawyer and current writer of Silesian history, mentioned that 2019 marked the bicentennial of Ratibor’s Gymnasium, or high school, still used today as a commercial school. To remind readers, Ratibor is the town where my father, Dr. Otto Bruck, was born in 1907. In Post 60, using background information provided by Mr. Newerla, I discussed the high school’s history and a publication Paul found archived at the British Museum written by the school’s first director, Dr. Carl Linge, entitled “Denkschrift über die feierliche Eröffnung des Königl. Evangel. Gymnasium zu Ratibor am 2. Juni 1819. . .,” “Memorandum on the solemn opening of the Royal Evangelical High School in Ratibor on June 2, 1819. . .” (Figure 1) This publication, printed in 1820, included a list of names of all first-year attendees, including two members of my Bruck family with only the initials of their forenames written in elaborate Gothic script, read by Paul as “S. Bruck” and J. Bruck.” (Figure 2) Based on the intimate knowledge of my family tree, I concluded these stood for Samuel Bruck (1808-1863) and Jonas Bruck (1813-1883), brothers who are shown as the children of Jacob Bruck in an abridged typed family tree developed by my Uncle Dr. Fedor Bruck. (Figure 3)
Typically, attendance at Gymnasiums begins between the ages of 10 and 12, give or take a year, so Samuel’s attendance in 1819 when he would have been 11 years old makes sense. However, his brother Jonas’s attendance in 1819, when he was only six years old seems implausible, unless he was exceptionally precocious. Absent any other incontrovertible evidence, however, this is the preliminary conclusion I came to in Post 60, namely, that Jonas Bruck had attended the Ratibor Gymnasium at a very early age.
Naturally, I became curious whether the original ledger of student names upon which Dr. Linge’s publication was based still exists, whether it is in the Polish State Archives in Racibórz or possibly curated by the Muzeum Racibórzu. Paul explained that because an existing commercial school now occupies the buildings of the former high school (Figure 4), some of the original records are retained there. In the recent past, there had apparently been some discussion about transferring the remaining ledgers to the archive or museum but for unknown reasons these negotiations ended acrimoniously.
Paul offered to contact the commercial school and inquire about the student ledgers, which he knew to have existed at one time because a colleague had shared some pictures of the “Album,” as it is referred to. Paul was recently granted access to the Gymnasium’s records. This turned out to be a frustrating exercise because the school was unable to initially locate the Album of student names for the period 1819 to 1849, even presented with irrefutable evidence of its existence in the form of pictures; Paul even checked the school’s archives, to no avail. Dispiritedly, Paul left his name and number, and asked them to call him if the Album was ever found.
Paul was not optimistic the ledger would turn up. He’s related some horror stories how nearby Polish and Czech Republic parishes have on occasion burned Kirchenbücher, church books, Kirchenmatrikeln, the roll or register of parishioners, and Pfarrmatrikel, parish matriculations, related to former German occupants of the area simply because none of their descendants live locally anymore. To use another archaeological analogy, it’s like pillaging a cultural site, ripping a page from prehistory, so to speak. So, it came as a pleasant surprise when several weeks after Paul’s visit to the former Ratibor Gymnasium he received a call telling him they’d finally located the Album in question. Paul promptly visited the commercial school and took pictures of the entire ledger of students covering the period 1819 through 1849, roughly 90 pages worth of material, which he sent me. (Figure 5)
I’ve been a coin collector much of my life and going through all the pages of the Ratibor Gymnasium Album was comparable to sorting through a cache of pennies in search of pre-1959 wheat chaff coppers. While the names of family members I discovered were relatively few, the information corresponding to each ancestor has provided multiple avenues for further investigation. The challenge is making sense of ancestral connections for people who lived 170 to 200 years ago in the context of what was a very large Bruck family at the time. As I mentioned at the outset, it’s a bit like playing three-dimensional chess
In the table below, I summarize the family data I gleaned from the Ratibor student ledger. Then, I examine using available primary source documents how or whether these people are or may be related.
SUMMARY OF FAMILY NAMES FROM RATIBOR GYMNASIUM ALBUM, 1819-1849
Readers will note that Isaac and Samuel Bruck’s names are listed in succession and bracketed, and the profession of their father is identical, an “Arrendator,” a leaseholder (i.e., holding property by lease). Thus, I assume they were brothers, although I had no prior knowledge of Isaac. Samuel Bruck (1808-1863) (Figure 7) was my great-great-grandfather, and I have photos of both he and his wife, Charlotte Bruck née Marle (1809-1861), later in life. Samuel purchased the family hotel in Ratibor, the Bruck’s “Prinz von Preußen” Hotel, around the middle of the 19th Century, following a career as a wood merchant.
My uncle Dr. Fedor Bruck produced an abbreviated typed family tree (Figure 3) that includes the names of Samuel Bruck and his brother Jonas (more on him later), shown to be the sons of Jacob Bruck and his wife Maria Aufrecht. From primary source documents, Jacob (Jakob) Nathan Bruck, his complete name, and Maria Aufrecht are known to have had other children. LDS microfilm roll 1184449 for Ratibor documents the birth of a daughter named Rebecka on the 10th of January 1815. (Figure 8) The same microfilm roll also documents the marriages of three of Jacob’s daughters, Wilhelmina, Dorothea, and Fanny, respectively, in 1814, 1817, and 1822 (Figure 9); the mother is not identified but I presume is Maria Aufrecht. And, yet another primary source document identifies Jacob Nathan Bruck as the father of a son named Marcus Moritz Bruck who married Nanette von Aldersthal in 1836 in Berlin at the age of 36 (Figure 10); again the mother is not named but I presume is Maria. So, from various sources, I can reasonably document that Jacob Nathan Bruck likely had at least eight children (i.e., Wilhelmina, Dorothea, Fanny, Marcus Moritz, Isaac, Samuel, Jonas, and Rebecka).
Let’s move on to Isaac and consider what primary sources are available for him. With the original Ratibor Gymnasium Album for 1819-1849 in hand, and with Isaac Bruck’s full name written out, I am now certain the initial for Isaac’s forename in Dr. Carl Linge’s 1820 publication referenced above was mistakenly recorded as a “J.” rather than an “I.” This led me to initially conclude that Jonas had attended the high school at the precocious age of 6. Not the case.
Isaac’s age at the time he attended the Ratibor Gymnasium in 1819 is stated as 13. Given that the Gymnasium Ratibor Album records students’ names starting on the 11th of May 1819, I generally place Isaac’s birth in the early part of 1806, though it could certainly have been in the latter half of 1805. I discovered a family tree on MyHeritage that gives an Isaac Bruck’s exact date of birth as the 9th of November 1805 in Breslau. However, upon locating the original birth register listing for this individual in the LDS microfilm for Breslau (LDS Roll 1184380, page 34 of 594), I found the listing is for someone named ISAAC BRUG. (Figure 11) Conceivably, an alternate spelling for “Bruck” in the early 19th Century could have been “BRUG,” but because the father is identified as “abr. Meyer Brug,” I’m dubious this is the same Isaac. I’m convinced Isaac’s father was Jacob Nathan Bruck because of his association in the student ledger with the name “Samuel Bruck,” whose father was assuredly Jacob. This is another example of something I rail about, the need to be cautious about adopting and replicating information found in other family trees without confirming the source of the data.
Years ago when I did a basic Google query on Isaac Bruck, I stumbled upon an intriguing announcement in Volume 18 of the “Amtsblatt für den Regierungsbezirk Marienwerder (Official Gazette for the Marienwerder District),” dated the 26th of May 1828 about him. (Figures 12a-b) There is no question the announcement relates to my ancestor as he is said to have come from Ratibor, and his age of 22 in 1828 coincides with my estimate of how old he would have been then had he been born between 1805 and 1806. It seems, the Security Services from the West Prussian town of Graudenz issued a bulletin in May of 1828 alerting the police authorities to arrest Isaac Bruck after he had gone AWOL or escaped from the local penitentiary. He was described as Jewish, 22 years old with black and curly hair, a black beard, a normal sized mouth, having an oval chin and face, of average stature, 5 feet 2 inches, with a scar on his right forearm from a horse bite. Whether Isaac was ever brought to justice remains unknown.
Several other primary sources from Ratibor make mention of Isaac Bruck and his wife Caroline Bruck née Stolz, who is identified as the daughter of Joachim Meyer Stolz. The birth register for Ratibor records Isaac and Caroline gave birth to a daughter named Fany on the 28th of December 1833 (Figure 13), who according to one of my cousins supposedly died in 1834. Isaac and Caroline’s divorce is recorded on the 19th of July 1835, and gives the name of Caroline’s father as “Joachim Meyer Stolz.” (Figure 14) Yet a third primary source from 1835, claiming that Caroline and Isaac are then living separately, states Isaac remarried a woman named Charlotte Leopold; this same document gives the names and dates of birth of Isaac and Caroline’s two other children, Marie born on the 27th of June 1832, and Heinrich on the 6th of January 1835. (Figure 15) Caroline Bruck née Stolz’s death certificate records her death in Berlin on the 24th of January 1875, and claims she was born in 1803 in Rawitsch [today: Rawicz, Poland]. (Figures 16a-b)
The Ratibor Gymnasium Album records Heimann’s enrollment on the 4th of April 1823, when he was 11 years old, placing his birth around 1812. Some ancestral trees claim his full name was “Heinrich Hermann Heimann Bruck.”
The Ratibor Gymnasium Album states that Heimann’s father was a “Destillateur,” a distiller, unlike Isaac and Samuel’s father, who, as mentioned, was an “Arrendator,” a leaseholder. Given that Jacob Nathan Bruck had so many siblings, it’s possible some lived in Ratibor, and that Heimann was one of Jacob’s nephews rather than his son. There is insufficient data to conclusively determine Heimann’s relationship to Jacob Bruck.
A Jonas Bruck, whose father was also a “Destillateur,” a distiller, was enrolled in the Ratibor Gymnasium on the 21st of April 1824, when he was 10 ½ years of age. Once again, the question of whether this Jonas was the son of Jacob Bruck or the son of one of his brothers or cousins is subject to debate. Let me explain.
The Jonas Bruck who was the son of Jacob Nathan Bruck and the father of the famed dentist Dr. Julius Bruck, discussed in Post 68, is buried in the Jewish Cemetery in Breslau; his dates of birth and death are thus known (i.e., b. 5 March 1813-d. 5 April 1883). (Figure 19) In April 1824, when Jonas was enrolled, he would already have been 11 years of age, not 10 ½ as noted. This, and the fact that the father of the Jonas who was enrolled in the Ratibor Gymnasium in April 1824 was “Destillateur” would suggest this is possibly not Jacob’s son. No way to be sure.
Marcus (Markus) Braun was enrolled at the Ratibor Gymnasium on the 19th of May 1829 at the age of 12 ½. Marcus, my great-great-grandfather, a Brauereipachter, or tenant brewer, was the subject of Post 14. He is known to have been born in 1817, and his age in 1829 confirms this.
Oscar (Oskar) Bruck was registered as a student at the Ratibor Gymnasium on the 22nd of May 1845. By this year, the precise date of birth of students rather than their age was recorded, and Oscar’s birth is noted as the 8th of October 1832, which corresponds with data available to me elsewhere (i.e., the Pinkus Family Collection at the Leo Baeck Institute). Oscar Bruck was my great-great-uncle.
On the 3rd of January 1846, a Heimann Bruck from another generation is enrolled at the Ratibor Gymnasium, and his father was “Sattlermeister,” or saddler. His date of birth is noted as the 26th of December 1833. It’s not clear how he’s related to Jacob Nathan Bruck. Figure 15 indicates that Isaac Bruck and Caroline Bruck née Stolz had a son named Heimann, born on the 6th of January 1835, so presumably the parents of the Heimann born on the 26th of December 1833 were someone other.
My great-grandfather Fedor Bruck (Figure 24), brother of Oscar Bruck, was enrolled at the Ratibor Gymnasium on the 27th of April 1848. His date of birth is recorded as the 30th of September 1834, which again corresponds with data available in the Pinkus Family Collection at the Leo Baeck Institute.
In preparing this Blog post, I conferred with one of my fourth cousins. He has in his possession a memoir written by his great-aunt Bertha Jacobson née Bruck, great-granddaughter of Jacob Nathan Bruck, claiming he was one of 17 children and had 12 children of his own with Maria Aufrecht!! One family tree manager, now deceased, has precise vital data on Jacob’s dates and places of birth and death (b. 18 February 1770, Pschow-d. 29 June 1832, Ratibor), as well as the birth years of a few of his children, but cites no source. Given the very precise dates and places, I’m inclined to believe they’re authentic, but I can’t independently confirm this, so I reserve judgement as to their accuracy.
Given the large number of potential ancestors Jacob Bruck may have had and the likelihood that names repeated themselves within and across generations, it’s difficult to pinpoint the relationship among all the Bruck members who attended the Ratibor Gymnasium absent more primary source documents.
In closing, I cannot emphasize strongly enough that many of the family history stories I relate on my Blog would be impossible without the generous assistance of a cadre of researchers and genealogists who offer their help free-of-charge simply because they derive a vicarious “high” from doing so. Obtaining the help of local historians and researchers, particularly native speakers, is especially valuable as they often have knowledge of historic documents, not yet automated, that an outsider, like myself, would be unaware of. The mere existence of my Blog, albeit of limited interest to most of the world, attracts enough attention by people in a position to further my ancestral investigations and allows me to relate some of my tales. To these named and unnamed people I’m eternally grateful.
Note: In this post, I talk about the Royal Evangelical Gymnasium (High School) in Ratibor, celebrating its 200th anniversary in 2019, and briefly discuss a contemporary publication from 1820 confirming my family’s connection to the city at that time.
This year Racibórz, Poland celebrates “200 Jahre der Königlichen Evangelischen Gymnasium zu Ratibor,” 200 Years of the Royal Evangelical Gymnasium (High School) in Ratibor. Around Easter, my friend Mr. Paul Newerla, retired lawyer and current Silesian historian, presented a lecture at the Muzeum w Raciborzu on this subject. In researching the school’s history, Paul discovered an old book published in Ratibor in 1820 upon the school’s opening, archived at the British Museum, entitled “Denkschrift über die feierliche Eröffnung des Königl. Evangel. Gymnasium zu Ratibor am 2. Juni 1819. . .,” “Memorandum on the solemn opening of the Royal Evangelical High School in Ratibor on June 2, 1819. . .” (Figure 1) Prior to Paul’s discovery, this publication was unknown to local historians.
This 1820 book contains an alphabetical listing of the students enrolled at the time the Gymnasium was opened, that, interestingly, includes two of my earliest ancestors (Figure 2):
These ancestors were brothers Jonas Bruck (1813-1883) (Figure 3) and Samuel Bruck (1808-1863) (Figure 4), sons of Jacob Nathan Bruck (1770-1832). In Post 11, I told readers the original owner of the family hotel in Ratibor, the Bruck’s “Prinz von Preußen” Hotel, had been my great-great-grandfather, the Samuel Bruck who attended the Ratibor Gymnasium. Previously, I’d known my family’s connection to Ratibor extended back to at least 1850, which corresponded to the approximate time when Samuel Bruck purchased the family hotel. However, Mr. Newerla brought to my attention information proving the Bruck family’s association with Ratibor in fact extended back at least one more generation to Samuel’s father. In Post 11, I reported that according to land registers from the city of Ratibor from the time of Jacob Bruck, he had been an arrendator, a leaseholder, on two properties within Ratibor. These were located, respectively, on Jungfrauenstraße and Stockhaus-Gasse, shown on an 1812 city map sent to me by Mr. Newerla. (Figure 5) How much earlier my Bruck family may have arrived in Ratibor, and from which Silesian town, remains unknown. Regardless, the list of the students enrolled at the Royal Evangelical Gymnasium in 1819 confirms an early 19th century connection to Ratibor by my ancestors.
Let me provide some brief historical background on the Royal Evangelical Gymnasium in Ratibor to help readers better understand the origins of the school, its locations, the age of the students, and their religious makeup.
Following a decision by the Royal Prussian Government on the 1st of October 1817, Ratibor became the seat of the Higher Regional Court of the Province of Upper Silesia. This coincided with the arrival of about twenty lawyers who discovered that Ratibor, then the largest city in Upper Silesia, had no grammar school for their children. Notably, those high schools that existed elsewhere at the time in Upper Silesia were all run by Catholic institutions or were in monasteries and were Catholic. The judges of the Higher Regional Court, as well as many other representatives of the intelligentsia, however, were Protestant. Thus, the President of the Regional Court of the Province of Upper Silesia appealed for the establishment of an Evangelical grammar school in Ratibor, which the King of Prussia granted on the 5th of June 1818. He appropriated 2,500 Reichtalers from the treasury for the maintenance of the new school and gave it the very spacious monastery of the Holy Ghost Dominican Church (Figure 6), which had been secularized in 1811. The monastery was located adjacent old city walls at the end of Jungfrauenstraße, coincidentally along the very street where Jacob Bruck leased property. Because the monastery buildings had to be renovated for school purposes, the Gymnasium was housed for a time in the former Franciscan monastery along Brunken (Figure 7), then located outside the city walls. Ratibor’s city walls, towers and gates, surrounding the town, were only demolished in 1828, after which the Prinz von Preußen was constructed at the corner of Oderstraße and Bollwerkstraße, eventually becoming the Bruck’s Hotel in the mid-19th Century.
When the Ratibor Gymnasium first opened its doors in the former Franciscan monastery, 114 students had passed an entrance examination and been admitted. Even though the high school was Protestant, paying students from all religious denominations could attend. The first class consisted of 40% Protestants, 50% Catholics, and 10% Jews. After only a few years the percent of Jewish students was at 20%, and never dropped much below this level, even though Ratibor’s Jewish population never exceeded 10%. This attests to the importance Jews attached to education.
The renovation of the grammar school on Jungfrauenstraße was not completed until 1827; the renovation included demolition of the east and north wings of the monastery, along with the removal of the city wall near the west wing, as it darkened the school rooms in this wing. Between 1819, when the grammar school opened, and 1827, when renovations were completed, the King of Prussia had issued an edict on January 16, 1821, giving the monastery church adjacent the Gymnasium to the Protestant parish (Figure 8) because their church located elsewhere in Ratibor was in danger of collapse on account of an unstable foundation.
By 1904, the Protestant parish had purchased a plot of land elsewhere in Ratibor on which to erect a new church. The plan had been to sell the former monastery church next to the Gymnasium to the Prussian State, dismantle the church, and use the parcel for the expansion of the grammar school. Even though essential components of the monastery dated to the 14th Century, the Conservator of the Provincial Burgermeister, essentially the Province of Silesia’s executive council, deemed the monastery to be of “insignificant monumental value.” This decision highlighted the power of Ratibor’s Protestants even over the General Conservator of the Province. It was only the refusal by the Prussian State to purchase the monastery that prevented its destruction and allows the facility to exist today as part of the Muzeum w Raciborzu. As a historic preservationist, I find it fascinating how serendipitous the survival of this noteworthy structure is.
By the 1870’s Ratibor’s Gymnasium numbered in excess of 700 students, so an approval and allocation of funds for an extension was obtained that was completed by 1881. (Figure 9) A third floor was eventually added to the high school. (Figure 10)
Attendance in kindergarten was optional. At the age of six one was admitted to elementary school. Schools were denominational until 1873, after which such religious schools were abolished. Compulsory education existed in Prussia since 1765, although unconditional compulsory education for boys and girls was not introduced until 1907. The school year started on the 1st of April, effectively after Easter. Following the fourth grade of elementary school, one could be admitted to high school with passage of an entrance exam, thus around the age of ten.
In the case of Samuel and Jonas Bruck who show up in 1819 as enrolled students in Ratibor’s Gymnasium, their attendance was no doubt due to passage of the entrance exam. Still, Jonas’ attendance at the precocious age of only six, he was born in 1813, seems early. There is no doubt, however, as to the year Jonas was born because he is buried along with one of his renowned sons and their respective wives in the Old Jewish Cemetery in Breslau [today: Wrocław, Poland], and his headstone provides his date of birth. (Figures 11a-b) Paul Newerla sent me one page of the register of students admitted to Ratibor’s Gymnasium along with their ages, and most were between 9 and 13 years of age. (Figure 12) This log still exists today, and, as we speak, Paul is working on having it donated to the Archiwum Państwowe W Katowicach Oddzial W Raciborzu (“State Archives in Katowice Branch in Racibórz”). Regardless of whether Paul is successful in this endeavor, he is working to access the log to check for other Bruck relatives who may have attended Ratibor’s Gymnasium over the years.
The names of the classes in the 9-year high school were taken from Latin. The lowest class was labeled “Sexta” (sixth), the next “Quinta” (fifth), then “Quarta.” The next three classes, “Tertia” (third), “Sekunda” (second), and “Prima” (first), each consisted of lower and upper grades, for example, “Untertertia” or “Obersekunda” (“unter” means lower, “ober” means upper). After completing the “Oberprima,” you could take the matriculation exam, the “Abitur,” that if passed allowed you to attend a university.
One other thing of passing interest regarding the Ratibor Gymnasium were its collections. In 1938, these consisted of a teacher’s library with 17,000 books, a student library with more than 2,000 volumes, as well as more than 200 books printed before 1600, and 28 incunabula, that is, books printed before 1501. The Ratibor Gymnasium also preserved collections considered useful such as minerals, plant specimens, seeds, mollusks and birds, as well as valuable numismatic collections. (Figures 13-14) When the Museum Raciborzu was founded in 1927, these collections were handed over to the museum. Unfortunately, the museum’s natural science collection, which was in the former Protestant rectory, burnt down in 1945 and has been completely lost.
One unusual exhibit, given to the Royal Evangelical Church in 1864 by the wealthy Jewish banker baron Anselm von Rothschild (Figure 15), lord of Chałupki and Szilerzowice, survives today in the Muzeum Raciborzu. As an archaeologist, I find this story fascinating. Around 1860, Anselm von Rothschild went on a journey to Egypt and brought back numerous souvenirs, among them a complete burial of an Egyptian woman which he intended as a wedding gift for his fiancée. The peculiar gift was rejected. Oddly, in Rothschild’s palace in Szilerzowice, in the presence of invited dinner guests, the two sarcophagi were opened, the cartonnage undone, and the embalmed corpse unwrapped from its bandages.
In 1864, the baron decided to rid himself of the mummy and donated it to the Antiquity Department of the Royal Evangelical Gymnasium. Along with the other collections preserved by the Gymnasium, the mummy was formally taken over by the Muzuem w Raciborzu when it was founded in 1927. The half-bandaged mummy, sarcophagi, and richly ornamented cartonnage as well as three canopic jars to keep the viscera of corpses, purchased from the Museum of Antiquity in Berlin before the war, today are the greatest attraction of the Muzeum w Raciborzu. (Figure 16) Scientific analysis on the mummy revealed it was an Egyptian woman who lived during the 12th Dynasty (946-722 B.C.) named Dzed-Amonet-ius-anch, meaning “goddess Amonet said she would live.” She was a wealthy married woman, probably the daughter of a priest and barber from Thebes, who apparently died of complications from pregnancy.
The Ratibor Gymnasium is still standing today and is currently used as an economic middle school. (Figure 17) According to Paul Newerla, this middle school is where the volume with the names of students enrolled in the former Gymnasium was once kept, along with portfolios of graduation certificates. As we speak, Paul is trying to track down the current provenience of these materials to access their contents and see what more they can tell us about my Bruck relatives.
1820 Denkschrift ueber die feierliche Eroeffnung des Koenigl. Evangel. Gymnasium zu Ratibor am 2. Juni 1819 nebst den dabei gehaltenen Reden des Consistorialrath Dr. Wachler und des Dr. Linge und anderen Beilagen, Ratibor.
After my wife and I examined the records at the Polish State Archives in Racibórz, our English-speaking research guide, Ms. Malgosia Ploszaj, suggested we visit the site of the former Jewish Cemetery once located on Leobschützerstrasse [today: Wilczej Górze and Fojcik głubczycki streets] on the outskirts of Raciborz. (Figure 1) Knowing family members had
once been buried here, I was particularly intrigued to see their final resting place. Malgosia had already warned my wife and me that the Jewish Cemetery no longer exists as such but consists merely of ivy-covered pathways meandering through a forested area scattered with fragmentary pieces of headstones (Figure 2), a cemetery originally 5 acres in extent. Beyond the occasional piece of headstone, the only original element of the former Jewish cemetery is the front entrance gate.
According to the International Jewish Cemetery Project (IJCP), this cemetery served the Jewish Community from about 1817 until the last two burials were placed here, respectively, in 1940 and 1941; by their estimate, no more than 200 Jews remained at the time of the “Final Solution” in Ratibor in 1942. While it may ultimately have been the intention of the Nazis to systematically destroy all Jewish cemeteries, by the end of the Third Reich some were still left intact, including the one in Ratibor. The reasons for this are not entirely clear, although its location on the outskirts of town may partially explain why it was not destroyed. However, with no surviving postwar Jewish community to tend the graveyard, nature was in effect gradually reclaiming it. Consequently, by 1973, a decision was taken by the Communist authorities to, in the words of the IJCP, “decommission the cemetery [and allow] masons from the surrounding area . . .to reuse them [the headstones] in Catholic cemeteries.” IJCP describes the gravestones dating from the second half of the 19th and early 20th centuries as “. . .black, white or pink marble or granite and sandstone. . .in traditional shapes or obelisks, boulders and more artistic forms with a wide array of decoration.” The inscriptions were a combination of Hebrew and German. Supposedly, following the Jewish cemetery’s decommissioning, it was used as a community garden.
Tangentially, I became intrigued about the destruction of Jewish culture. There is a widely circulated notion that once having exterminated the Jews, the Nazis planned a “Museum to an Extinct Race”; in 2015, while on a walking tour of WWII sites in Prague, our tour guide in fact brought this up. Prague is widely associated as the place where this museum was to be located because upwards of 100,000 Jewish liturgical, religious, historical, and archival objects were archived there at the Central Jewish Museum. Suffice it to say, the idea of such a museum is a myth and there never existed a Nazi plan to create such a museum. The phrase “Museum to an Extinct Race” was in fact coined by Jews following WWII. For readers interested in reading about this myth, I direct them to a video of a fascinating lecture given by Dale Bluestein, former Director of the “Memorial Scrolls Trust”: https://vimeo.com/120373842
In recent years, the Polish schools have apparently taken an interest in re-discovering their Jewish history. Malgosia showed me the product of one such endeavor, a booklet prepared by local students and published by the European Union, written in both Polish and German. This booklet is entitled in German “Vergessene Geschichte der Juden aus dem Ratiborer Lande,” which translates roughly as “Forgotten history of the Jews from the land of Ratibor.” (Figure 3) The cover page includes a hand-tinted drawing of the former Jewish synagogue, along with additional pictures inside showing the conflagration as it was destroyed on Kristallnacht, November 9-10, 1938.
Figure 4-Moorish-style Jewish synagogue as it looked in 1889 when it opened
Following Kristallnacht, the Moorish synagogue (Figure 4), which had originally been built in 1889, survived as a ruin until 1958, when Communist authorities demolished it.
Inside this publication are multiple photographs of the headstones of the former Jewish cemetery, amazingly, including one of my great-grandparents grave, Hermann Berliner (1840-1910) and Olga Berliner, nee Braun (1853-1920). (Figures 5, 6) Malgosia graciously obtained an original copy of this booklet for me, and explained that the majority of the headstones from the former Jewish cemetery were photographed before the gravestones were disposed of. It remains unclear whether these photographs were taken by a well-intentioned individual
Figure 6-My great-grandfather Hermann Berliner (1840-1910)
interested in documenting history, or by the Polish Security Services with some nefarious purpose in mind to further “torment” dead Jews and their descendants come back to reclaim stolen Jewish property.
The most remarkable thing, I came to discover, is that the original photographs of all the headstones from the former Jewish cemetery are archived at the Muzeum Raciborzu. (Figure 7) My wife and I learned of their existence too late to actually schedule a visit there in 2014, but immediately upon my return to the States that year, I contacted one of the curators at the museum and asked
Figure 7-Curator Adam Knura at entrance to Muzeum Raciborzu
if we could examine these photos on a subsequent visit; the archivist indicated this would present no problem. So, upon our return to Raciborz in 2015, again in the company of Malgosia, we examined and photographed all the pictures. (Figures 8, 9)
The curators at the museum have created an Excel spreadsheet with the names of all the people once interred at the Jewish cemetery, along with their dates of birth and death, where this information can be gleaned from the pictures. A copy of this database was given to me. Over the years, I’ve had occasion to compare the birth and death information obtained for a few individuals from the headstones with comparable information obtained from original birth or death certificates for these same people, and, interestingly, I’ve found some discrepancies not owing to archival errors but, ironically, to incorrect dates being inscribed in stone. One can only wonder whether surviving relatives “lost track” of the year their ancestors had been born. In any case, the Excel spreadsheet with the names of the entombed has provided a wealth of useful family history information.
The previously discussed booklet included a touching photo of “small” headstones once belonging to the graves of children who’d perished at birth or shortly thereafter. (Figure 10) I knew that my great-grandparents on my grandfather’s side had eight children but had only been able to track the fate of six of them. I was hoping these headstones would shed some light on the fate of the other two, but this was not to be.
